RUTHFULLY YOURS

Based on “interviews with officials familiar with the documents,” The Hill is reporting that more than half of the memoranda former FBI director James Comey made regarding his conversations with president-elect and then President Trump contain classified information. The FBI, moreover, has determined that all of the memos are government documents.

This will come as a surprise to no one who has been following this story on National Review. In a column on Comey’s memos a month ago, I explained that there was no doubt the memos were government documents (regardless of the former director’s suggestion that they were his personal property, memorializing his “recollection recorded” of his conversations with the president). I further explained that, while Comey’s judgment that the memos were not classified was entitled to considerable weight, we could not make a conclusive judgment on this because (a) we had not seen them and (b) they had not yet been subjected to “a classification review . . . by the White House or the Justice Department.”

I was inclined to give Comey the benefit of the doubt on the classification question. If The Hill’s report is accurate, however, a classification review has now happened, and it has been determined that more than half of the memos contain classified information.

Comey has stated in congressional testimony that he made seven memos of the nine conversations he recalls having with Trump.

In another intemperate tweet this morning, President Trump asserted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!” In reality, we do not yet know whether this is the case. For starters, The Hill’s report is based on leaks (which, I’d note, the president is not complaining about this time). The government has not taken a formal public position on the memos yet.

Second, even if we assume the report is accurate (as I am inclined to do), it indicates that at least four of the seven memos contain classified information — not that all of them do.

Comey testified that he gave at least one memo to an intermediary, a law professor at Columbia. (Full disclosure: The professor is a friend and former colleague of mine. I have not discussed the Comey memos with him.) The intermediary disclosed at least a portion of the memo to the New York Times. Thus, we do not know whether Comey gave all, some, or just one of the memos to the intermediary; we do not know whether the one memo we can be sure the intermediary got contained classified information; and we do not know whether the portion the intermediary shared with the Times was classified.

It is certainly possible that classified information was transmitted to persons not authorized to have it. But at this point, that has not been established.

There will be much to say about all this going forward. For now, I’ll stick to two precedents: Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus.

Claims about the classification status of Comey’s memos bring us right back to Hillary Clinton’s claims that her emails were not “marked classified,” and therefore that she lacked knowledge that they were classified when she stored and transmitted them. Ironically, as I recounted in the aforementioned column, it was Comey, then the FBI’s director, who debunked this theory (in his July 2016 press conference):

It is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

As I elaborated:

To put a finer point on it, whether or not something is classified depends on the contents, not on whether some official with classification authority has deemed it, say, “top secret” and stamped it as such. As we pointed out during the Clinton e-mails hullaballoo, many government documents are “born classified.” That is, the contents of the documents fit the classification categories spelled out in the controlling executive order (EO 13526).

That brings us to the Petraeus precedent, which is relevant for two reasons.

First, as I explained in the column, the prosecution of former CIA director Petraeus — who pled guilty to misdemeanor mishandling of classified information — demonstrates that “the government regards many communications between national-security officials and the president as classified.” Petraeus’s journals are very similar in this regard to Comey’s memos because, among other sensitive documents, they contained notes of Petraeus’s conversations with the president of the United States (while Petraeus was a general commanding U.S. forces overseas).

Although Petreaus’s journals were not “marked classified,” he clearly knew that the journals were highly classified, based on his high-ranking national-security position and training in the handling of sensitive information. He thus never disputed this fact.

Second, Petraeus also did not dispute that the person with whom he shared the journals — his paramour and biographer — was not authorized to have access to them. On this score, it is noteworthy that the woman in question actually had a security clearance. Petraeus, nevertheless, did not attempt to claim this authorized the transmission of the journals to her. Again, in his high-ranking position, he knew that even having a security clearance did not qualify a person for access to all classified information. One must have a security clearance sufficiently high to warrant access to the material in question — and some classified information (including what was in Petraeus’s journals) is so closely held that even an official with a top-secret clearance must have a “need to know” and be “read into the program” to which the information relates.

Daniel Bonevac is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/09/inside-chomsky-world/

Some 35 years ago I attended a party in honor of Noam Chomsky. A group of us stood around him, hearing his thoughts on the relevance of psychology to linguistic theory. Inevitably, conversation flagged—not least because he didn’t see much relevance in it—so I piped in. I had just seen an ad in Forbes featuring Chomsky, and I asked him how that had come about. What followed was an hour-long lecture on American Middle-East policy. The group dwindled as he went on. Soon I was the only one left listening. His account was multifaceted, intricate, and utterly brilliant. As far as I could tell, it touched on reality only lightly. But it was an intellectual tour de force of a sort.

That brings me to philosopher George Yancy’s interview with Chomsky the other day in the New York Times. To say that it touches on reality lightly would be far too kind.

So, why talk about it at all? Because some people are still listening. I have friends on the Left who think highly of this interview. They believe it captures something important. And I want to understand what they see in it. I’m interested in how people on the Left are thinking about our current political moment.

I used to understand liberals. We tended to share the same goals, though we might prioritize them differently. We disagreed about various empirical questions. But we could discuss them openly and rationally.

That rarely seems possible now. I no longer understand why many of my political opponents see the world as they do. Whatever they are, they aren’t liberals. I find it hard to find common ground. And that worries me.

Consider Yancy’s opening question: “Given our ‘post-truth’ political moment and the growing authoritarianism we are witnessing under President Trump . . . .”

Stop right there. What “growing authoritarianism”? Let’s see, it’s been five months. Has Trump sent stormtroopers to assault members of other parties? Has he jailed thousands of Democrats, including their political leaders, for thought crimes? Has he cajoled the Congress to grant all legislative power to his cabinet? Did he burn down the Capitol and blame it on the Democrats? Has he opened concentration camps for his political opponents? Have his followers roamed campuses burning books? No? Within five months of seizing power Hitler had done all that.

What are these people talking about?

Apparently, Chomsky’s answer reveals, climate change, “a truly existential threat to survival of organized human life.” That’s right. Climate change—and the North Carolina legislature and Trump administration declining to act on it.

If this seems out of proportion to authoritarianism rhetoric, that’s because it is.

It’s also an article of quasi-religious faith rather than a rational conclusion. Yancy and Chomsky assume that science shows us that we face an existential threat. Neither is trained in environmental science. Has either read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—not the political summary, but the whole thing? Do they read scientific journals on the topic? Are they familiar with the arguments of critics such as Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke? Do they read blogs by critics such as Watts Up with That? Can they discuss the differences between satellite data sets? The differences between those, oceanic measurements, and surface records? Are they familiar with the variation among existing models? Can they explain why some ought to be preferred to others? If so, no sign of it here. The issue isn’t up for debate.

Linda Sarsour bores me. She is the radical flavor-of-the-month. But she is a numbingly familiar type to longtime observers of sharia supremacists in the West: the forked tongue, the flag-draped anti-Americanism, the close partnership with the hard left, and so on. Eight years ago, I wrote a book called The Grand Jihad about this breed of Muslim Brotherhood-mold operative. Sarsour fits the pathology to a tee … but once you’re on to them, these people are a dime a dozen. Yawn.

She got my attention, though, with her call for “jihad” in executing the Islamist-Leftist “resistance” to Donald Trump. Naturally, this has led to a brouhaha about whether she was really calling for violence or using “jihad” in the revisionist non-violent sense of “an internal struggle for personal betterment.”

I have no doubt that Lee Smith (in Tablet) is correct: Sarsour is a provocateur who was trying to call attention to herself while laying the groundwork to play the victim when she was inevitably criticized. What I have found amusing, however, are the two premises urged by her apologists: (a) we should take the jihad revisionism seriously; and (b) she must have meant “non-violent” jihad because she introduced the term by referring to a hadith in which Mohammed, Islam’s prophet, explains that, rather than violence, “the best form of jihad” is to speak “a word of truth” before a tyrant.

On the first point, jihad is essentially a forcible struggle. As Lee Smith points out, the evidence of sense should tell us all we need to know about it: just look at what is happening “on the killing fields of the Middle East.” Still, we do not need to make a deduction because the meaning of the word is clear, and because non-violent connotations of jihad are understood to be in support of the same mission as forcible jihad: the implementation of sharia, Islam’s societal framework and legal code.

Derivatives of “jihad” are used numerous times in the Koran in the militaristic sense. As I explained in Willful Blindness, my memoir about prosecuting jihadist terrorists in the mid-nineties, Bernard Lewis, the West’s pre-eminent historian of Islam, observes that “some modern Muslim theologians” have attempted to interpret the term as “striving … in a spiritual and moral sense.” Yet, he counters, “The overwhelming majority of early authorities,… citing relevant passages in the Qur’an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.”

Furthermore, Thomas Patrick Hughes’s renowned A Dictionary of Islam (1895) defines jihad as follows:

A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims.

Note here that there is nothing contradictory in the concepts of (a) waging war to establish the reign of Islamic law, and (b) striving in other ways to advance Islam and repel evil from Muslims – which, Islam teaches, is also done by establishing sharia. Thus, the premise that the non-violent jihad negates violent jihad has always been nonsense. The varieties of jihad work together toward the same end. To take a prominent example, many American Islamists who claim to reject terrorist jihad nonetheless support Hamas; they rationalize this contradiction by claiming that Hamas’s jihad is “resistance” not “terrorism” – got it?

In any event, we should note that Sarsour gave her jihad speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA was established by the Muslim Brotherhood to be a progression from the Muslim Students Association, the Brotherhood’s foundational building block in the West. In the Justice Department’s terrorism financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case, ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator because the evidence demonstrated that it participated in the movement of funds to Hamas.

ISNA has a close collaborative relationship with the Brotherhood’s American think tank, the International Institute of Islamic Thought. IIIT provided an endorsement to Reliance of the Traveller, the English translation of an ancient sharia manual. The manual (sec. o9.0) relates this duality of jihad as a fundamentally military concept, in which forcible and non-forcible means are joined in the mission of implementing sharia:

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is the spiritual warfare against the lower self ( nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”

On Friday, I spoke on Capitol Hill at the Federalist Society’s symposium “The Constitutional War Powers of the Executive and Legislative Branches.” This weekend’s column is adapted from those remarks.

As we gather here on Capitol Hill today, the United States armed forces are engaged in combat operations in several global hot spots. In Syria, we have not only conducted attacks against the regime without any congressional authorization; we are now occupying territory as well.

Ostensibly, we are there to fight not the regime or its Russian and Iranian allies but the Islamic State jihadist organization (also known as ISIS). But to the extent that is a legally “authorized” conflict, it is against an enemy that arguably did not exist when the relevant authorizations for the use of military force (AUMF) were debated and enacted about 15 years ago.

Now, you could say, as we have been saying, that ISIS is merely a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda — it began as the terror network’s Iraqi franchise. Consequently, it is covered under the existing AUMF. This, however, ignores the inconvenience that al-Qaeda, along with its allied Islamist factions, is also fighting ISIS and the Assad regime in Syria. Essentially, the enemy that we started out fighting after it attacked America in 2001, and that still regards the United States as its mortal enemy, is nevertheless fighting in Syria alongside the “rebel” elements that we support.

In that sense, the situation mirrors our misadventure in Libya. That was another recent conflict in which a president, without congressional authorization, launched an aggressive war against a foreign sovereign that not only posed no threat to the United States but was actually regarded as a key counterterrorism ally — precisely because, for all its many flaws, the Qaddafi regime was providing us with intelligence about militants in places like Benghazi and Derna, the Libyan support hubs for the jihad against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is to say, in Libya, we initiated an unnecessary war without any debate among the people’s representatives, much less any congressional authorization, and the result was a catastrophe: the undoing of a counterterrorism ally in a dangerous neighborhood, the empowerment of our jihadist enemies, a failed state, and an administration reduced to absurd rationalizations about how its aerial bombing raids on regime targets were somehow not acts of war.

It is tempting on this record to draw the conclusion that modern practice has superseded the Constitution’s separation of war powers and division of war-making authorities between the commander-in-chief and the Congress. But when we get down to brass tacks, this simply is not true.

It is not true for a reason that is often forgotten in our debates about war powers, which are dominated by lawyers. They tend to take place under the auspices of legal academic institutions or organizations like our host today, my good friends and colleagues of the Federalist Society.

The reason is this: We are a body politic, not a legal community — at least, not in the main. For any free society to flourish, it must of course be undergirded by the rule of law. But the Constitution is basically a political document, not a legal one. It is the assignment and division of political authority among actors who compete and collude based on the attendant circumstances.

This is critical because war is a political exercise — “politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz memorably put it. There are legal elements to it, but it is basically a political endeavor — the use of government power, in this instance force, against a foreign enemy in order to break the enemy’s will. Though you wouldn’t know it to listen to most war-powers discussions, there is a limit to how much war can be “judicialized” or subjected to antecedent legal rules and procedures.

A state of war, after all, is the antithesis of our domestic peacetime footing. It is the proud boast of our legal system that we would rather see the guilty go free than have a single person wrongly convicted. Thus, we presume against the government. The accused is presumed to be innocent and has no burden to prove anything. The government must meet weighty standards of proof to conduct a search, obtain a wiretap, make an arrest, or secure a conviction. Our bottom line, as former Bush-41 attorney general William Barr has observed, is that we would rather see the government lose — i.e., justice is not the conviction of the guilty; it is a government forced to meet its burden under strict due-process rules.

War is entirely different. In war, we don’t want the government to lose, and we cannot give the enemy the presumption of innocence. In war, it is in the national interest that the government prevail. Yes, our troops are the world’s best trained and most disciplined, and we demand of them adherence to the laws and customs of civilized warfare. But the highest national interest is to defeat the enemy and to achieve the objective so vital that it was worth going to war over.

David Gerlenter writing in the Wall Street Journal says something self-evidently true. The Left seems to have won every single culture battle fought.

Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

The late Andrew Breitbart noticed the same thing. Observing that “politics is downstream from culture” he argued the Left has made us the villains of our own stories.

Our lives — indeed, our very species — has storytelling wound into our DNA. … Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. …

Thus we come to politics … the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals. … Liberals control story. …What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV. Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film). The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America. Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders. David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time. Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.

Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets. The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.

Even before Breitbart’s warning there was Orwell who understood that the Left’s ultimate ability was to uproot the past and plant their chosen seed for the future. His famous dictum “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past” is an unsurpassed indictment of groupthink totalitarianism. There seemed no doubt they would succeed. Within its bubble the Left’s control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it’s about them.

Yet the real mystery — one which even Orwell himself did not anticipate — is why, despite having won every culture battle, the Left has lost the war. Look around you. Every single country which adopted socialism as an economic system went bankrupt. The Soviet Union collapsed. Now the Western Gramscian project is self-immolating in the fires of its own absurdity. The current political crisis is the collective shudder of mortality passing through “every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation”. The left may have “wrapped up the culture war two generations ago” but it is rotting inside the wrapping.

The search is on for the regicide.

The only thing one can be sure of is that the Republican Party didn’t cause it; nor did their tame and feeble publications. In fact not even publications like Breitbart, valiant though their efforts were, can claim credit. Trump couldn’t have done it either, since the proud tower that Gerlenter describes would have been impervious to the mere touch of the orange-hued real estate mogul without some other factor in play.

Yet most of us know who did it, though we hesitate to name the obvious suspect. The Left even in its downfall has stilled our tongues. The word comes to the edge of our lips before we choke it back, fearful even now of the ridicule and abuse we will get should we blurt it. That word is God. God killed the Left. Of course one could legitimately use some other term. “Reality”, “consequences”, the “laws of nature”, “economics”, even “truth” will do. Through some process of increasing entropy, failed memory management or unanticipated side effects the status quo — the one dominated by the Left — is collapsing. CONTINUE AT SITE

According to a federal report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Trump’s administration is experiencing one national security leak a day, far surpassing — by seven times! — those that occurred under Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

The Senate report summarized its findings:

In short, the unauthorized disclosure of certain information can cost American lives, and our laws protecting this information provide for harsh punishments when violated. Since President Trump assumed office, our nation has faced an unprecedented wave of potentially damaging leaks of information protected by these important laws.

Under President Trump’s predecessors, leaks of national security information were relatively rare, even with America’s vibrant free press. Under President Trump, leaks are flowing at the rate of one a day…

The Trump administration faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day— containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.

Leaks with the capacity to damage national security flowed about seven times faster under President Trump than during President Obama’s and President George W. Bush’s first 126 days.

The majority of leaks during the Trump administration, 78, concerned the Russia probes, with many revealing closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.

Other leaks disclosed potentially sensitive intelligence on U.S. adversaries or possible military plans against them. One leak, about the investigation of a terrorist attack, caused a diplomatic incident between the United States and a close ally [Israel].

The report also notes that news articles across a “range of national news organizations” beginning on Inauguration Day included the leaked information which could harm national security. A majority ran in The Washington Post and The New York Times:

Leaked stories appeared in 18 news outlets, sourced to virtually every possible permutation of anonymous current and former U.S. officials, some clearly from the intelligence community. One story cited more than two dozen anonymous sources.

Nearly all of the stories leaked in Trump’s first 126 days were about the president or his administration. The report contrasts the previous administration saying, “[O]nly half of the stories leaked during the comparable period of the Obama administration were about President Obama or his administration; the other half concerned President Bush and his anti-terrorism tactics.”

Read the full report here.

In the wee morning hours of July 5, a Bronx police officer, 48 year-old Miosotis Familia, was shot dead as she sat in her patrol car.

Familia was a 12-year veteran of the New York Police Department and the mother of three children. She was murdered by 34-year-old Alexander Bonds, a career criminal with a record for violence, including violence against police officers.

Officer Familia, judging from her name and photograph, is a dark complexioned Hispanic.

The scumbag who robbed her of her life is black.

This last point bears mentioning, for there is no way to divorce this cold-blooded, unprovoked assassination of one of New York’s Finest from the anti-police Zeitgeist to which forces on the left have given rise. It’s true, of course, that there has long existed in America, especially since the emergence of leftist “liberationist” movements in the 1960’s, hostility toward those entrusted with maintaining the thin blue line between civilization and savagery.

Yet it’s equally true that this hostility accelerated considerably during Barack Obama’s second term as President, particularly since the shooting death of Mike Brown and the Black Lives Matter movement that arose in its wake.

Leftists are forever excusing non-white actors for their conduct, however atrocious it may be. It is to “the root causes,” the context of “social conditions” or “institutions,” that we must turn to account for why, say, blacks, though comprising no more than 13% or so of the American populace, are responsible for over half of all murders.

In other words, non-whites are never, ultimately, accountable for those of their behaviors that are undesirable and destructive (it is always and only their bad behavior from which nonwhites are exempted of responsibility). It is “society,” i.e. whites, who bear accountability for the bad deeds of nonwhites.

Never, though, do leftists look upon their own words and deeds as “root causes.” Indeed, while the search for “root causes” and the specific excuses that the left invokes are almost always fundamentally wrongheaded for more than one reason, to understand patterns of conduct larger contexts must be sought.

And the shooting death of a police officer by a black criminal does in fact belong to an all-too extensive—and established—pattern.

The former Soviet Union possessed many imaginative mechanisms to deal with the problem of enemies of the people who obstructed the path to socialist utopia — now known as “social justice.” One of those mechanisms was the practice of confining individuals who were thinking the wrong thoughts to insane asylums. Indeed, if you caused any trouble for the commissars, a good inoculation of neuroleptics (powerful drugs used to “quiet” the symptoms of schizophrenia), forcibly administered through a tube in the nose, could do wonders in bringing your politically incorrect behavior to a halt.

Dissidents such as Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Esenin-Volpin and Joseph Brodsky were all among the brave freedom-fighters who bore the brunt of the Soviet practice of institutionalizing dissidents in mental hospitals and force-feeding them mind-shattering drugs. Gorbanevskaya was committed to a psychiatric hospital for attending the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Grigorenko suffered the same fate for criticizing the Khrushchev regime. Bukovsky was confined to a psychiatric hospital for “anti-Soviet agitation.” Brodksy was sent to mental hospitals for not writing the right kind of poetry; his treatments involved “tranquilizing” injections, sleep deprivation and forced freezing baths. Esenin-Volpin was institutionalized in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for his anti-Soviet thoughts.

Today’s progressive Democrats are also faithfully journeying on an uplifting odyssey. Horrified by Trump’s opposition to Obama’s “fundamental transformations,” they have found their own neuroleptics in the form of the 25th Amendment and a bill seeking to impeach the president for being mentally unsound. Indeed, Trump has to be mentally deranged and unfit for office, because what other reason could possibly explain his frightening disagreement with the Left’s un-American creed of identity politics — race and gender uber alles? What other factor could possibly be at play in his embrace of individual freedom and responsibility — and in his rejection of group privileges and racial/gender hierarchies that, as David Horowitz has noted, can only be manifested after America’s Constitution is null and void?

Confronted by Trump’s shocking blasphemy against their anointed plan, several Democrats, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), have now signed onto a bill that seeks to remove Trump by invoking 25th Amendment powers. The bill cites section 4 of the amendment, created in 1967 after JFK’s assassination, that allows for an independent body to remove the president based on the determination that he has been mentally or physically incapacitated to carry out his duties. Raskin’s initiative would activate a probe into whether Trump has been too far “incapacitated” to continue as president.

This effort is, actually, even sicker than the Soviet practice, since the amendment does not refer to psychiatric problems, but to actual incapacitation through assassination or stroke.

Raskin claims he is concerned that “something is seriously wrong” with Trump, citing a “sustained pattern of behavior” and several “errant and seemingly deranged tweets,” which he believes are damaging to U.S. interests. But to anyone who hasn’t drunk the progressive Kool-Aid, it is obvious that Trump’s sustained pattern of behavior is not damaging U.S. interests. Instead, it is unhinging his political enemies and damaging the progressive assault on America’s social contract. Trump’s tweets do not warn, for example, that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam (an Obama meme) or that you can keep your doctor if you like him. They are singing the praises of America and calling out a corrupt media for its brazen lies and political partisanship.

The assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia, who was sitting in her vehicle doing paperwork when she was shot in the head, is the latest instance of the national “War on Cops.” Her murderer, Alexander Bonds—subsequently gunned down by cops—was a career criminal who boasted of having attended “Attica High School,” and had previously beaten up a police officer with a pair of brass knuckles.

Bonds, whose Facebook page displays a picture of him wearing a T-shirt reading “Coming Out Hard,” hated the police and blamed them for his problems. He posted a video of a young man assaulting a female officer, agreeing with a comment that she was a “lil bitch” who had “to prove something.” Bonds also called for the release of leftist hero and convicted cop-killer Judith Clark, a participant in the notorious 1981 Westchester Brinks robbery on behalf of the Black Liberation Army. Depicting himself as a vicious pit bull straining at the leash, wearing a spiked collar, Bonds described “vengeance” as his most “deadly” characteristic: “If someone hurts you, they have to feel the full force of your wrath and your vengeance is swift and merciless.”

Officer Familia, the tragic target of Bonds’ twisted sense of justice for the miserable consequences of his bad choices, was by all accounts a model citizen and heroic public servant. A former Red Cross worker and registered nurse, the mother of three had served on the NYPD for 12 years. At the time of her murder, Officer Familia was guarding a corner that had been the site of a recent shooting, in a demonstration of the NYPD’s commitment to “flooding the zone” to restore order to neighborhoods afflicted by criminality.

The murder of Officer Familia is only the most recent of a deadly series of attacks on law enforcement officers around the country. The murders of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in December 2014 by a gunman apparently seeking revenge for the death of Eric Garner; the killings of seven police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas by a radical black separatist in July 2016; and the murder of two Des Moines cops last November by a disgruntled “loner” are three of the most prominent ambush killings of cops in recent years. But these incidents only scratch the surface of what San Antonio police chief William McManus described earlier this week as general “hatred” toward police officers.

That hostility arises largely from a media-fed narrative—promoted cynically by liberal politicians—that black men are unjustly targeted and killed by police. In fact, incarceration rates by race, age, and sex largely track criminality, and research demonstrates that black men are actually less likely than whites to be killed during police confrontations, when adjusting for crime rates.

Anti-police sentiment has led to “de-policing” across America, though not yet—thankfully—in New York. But in Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit, murder rates have shot up as law enforcement has retreated from proactive policing of high-crime neighborhoods. The Black Lives Matter movement and its rhetoric of victimhood have thus helped lead to more black deaths. And now the killing of Officer Familia by Alexander Bonds can be added to that sad and growing list.

Seth Barron is associate editor of City Journal and project director of the NYC Initiative at the Manhattan Institute.